Supported Housing: Benefit

Debate between Oliver Colvile and Jess Phillips

Wednesday 20th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. You never fall apart, in any circumstances.

I welcome all interventions from Members who know more about this issue than I do. My feelings about it are no secret. The Minister has stood on many platforms with me, and it is a delight to see her on the Front Bench. I will talk mainly about refuge accommodation for victims of domestic and sexual violence. However, I am also talking about all sorts of supported accommodation.

I have spoken in every debate on this issue, and I have asked the Prime Minister, every single time I have had an opportunity, to do something about it. So far I am still waiting. However, that Prime Minister is yesterday’s man, and now I look to the words of today’s woman, and I am pleased to say that I do not have to look very far to find affirmation that the new Prime Minister in fact agrees with me. In the “Violence against Women and Girls Strategy 2016-2020” published by her Home Office, she stated that we must

“ensure all victims get the right support at the right time”.

Let me be clear today: unless the Government exempt refuges from local housing allowance caps to housing benefit, victims of domestic violence, rape and abuse will have no chance of getting what the Prime Minister describes as the

“right support at the right time”.

In the same strategy document, the right hon. Lady heralds the money that everybody keeps going on about—I have heard many Members singing its praises today—but it is a tiny fraction of the picture. Government money allocated for refuge funding is always short-term. Despite all the talk of sustainability, it is never there; it never has been there and it is never built in. I know that because I have helped to write all the bids for all the money that everybody in the Chamber is talking about, and in every single bid for refuge services in this country, the sustainability plan was based on housing benefit. Many refuges rely entirely on housing benefit.

[Oliver Colvile]

Is the hon. Lady aware that Devon and Cornwall police has been doing an enormous amount of work on refuges and abuse through an initiative called Operation Encompass? If she is not aware of it, would she like to come down to Plymouth? I would love to help her to make that visit.

[Jess Phillips]

As we enter the summer recess, I would love a little trip to Cornwall. I hasten to add that police forces across the country are doing really quite good work, as are police and crime commissioners, but I am afraid to say that I have never seen an example of their funding supported accommodation.

It would be dishonest now for Ministers to undermine their own work—Ministers of this Government signed it off when they allocated the money; they are all happy to stand up and sing its praises—because every single plan had housing benefit within it.

It is complicated and difficult for people to understand what running a refuge actually looks like. The grants the Government give are what we use to pay for staff. They are used to pay for family support workers, who enable a child to re-engage with a mother who has lost all control over her children because a perpetrator has taken it from her. They allow key staff to give counselling and support to women who have been brutally raped, beaten, kept locked away and controlled to a degree that no one in this Chamber could ever imagine. That is what the grants from the Government pay for. What pays for the nuts and bolts, the beds, the buildings, the places where people live, their homes and their security is housing benefit.